Experience

The Idea: Fadi Ghandour has built one of the most successful entrepreneurial enterprises to emerge from the Arab world, Aramex International , overcoming rejections, cash-flow crises, and naysayers in every country where he tried to do business.

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Companies spend more than $2 trillion on acquisitions every year, yet the M&A failure rate is between 70% and 90%. Executives can dramatically increase their odds of success, the authors argue, if they understand how to select targets, how much to pay for them, and whether and how to integrate them.

The most common reasons for making an acquisition include holding on to a premium position or cutting costs. But to realize those benefits, the acquirer needs to achieve economies of scale by absorbing the target’s resources into its operations. CEOs, who are often unrealistic about the performance boost from such acquisitions, must be sure not to pay too much for them.

A less-familiar reason for making an acquisition is to fundamentally change a company’s growth trajectory. In those deals, the acquirer uses the target’s business model as a platform for growth. Because the business models with the most transformative potential are often disruptive, they can be difficult to evaluate, and CEOs often believe that such acquisitions are overpriced. In fact, however, those are the ones that can pay off spectacularly.

Spotlight

Job requirements at the top of corporations have changed. Companies have come to expect much more from their C-level executives, who need new and different skills to deal with today’s business realities. Exactly what abilities do firms want in their leaders—now and in the future? By examining hundreds of job profiles developed by executive-search firm Heidrick & Struggles and interviewing numerous senior managers, the authors have identified some clear trends.

One strikingly consistent finding is that today technical and functional expertise matters less at the top than business acumen and “soft” leadership skills do. Members of senior management now have more in common with their peers than with the people they manage. To thrive at the C-level, you must be a strong communicator, a collaborator, and a strategic thinker. You need a global mind-set and will be expected to offer your CEO deep insights on key business decisions.

This article explores those developments in more detail and explains other findings about the latest requirements in each of seven C-level jobs: CIO, chief marketing and sales officer, CFO, general counsel, chief supply-chain management officer, chief human resources officer, and CEO. It offers a road map for ambitious managers who want to know which skills they should focus on developing in order to rise up the chain of command.

People reinvent themselves all the time—they may want a new challenge, a new line of work, or a new image among their colleagues. Taking control of your brand can mean the difference between an unfulfilling job and a rewarding career. But how can you persuade others to take the reinvented you seriously? The author presents a five-step approach.

Define your destination. Check out industry trade journals, do informational interviews, even try an internship. See if your company offers shadow programs or sabbaticals. Then build the skills necessary for your new path.

Leverage your points of difference. Use your past experiences and any distinguishing characteristics to your advantage, even if they’re not strictly relevant to your work.

Develop a narrative. Learn to communicate exactly how your past fits into the present, and focus on the value your experience brings (rather than on your own interests) when explaining your transition.

Reintroduce yourself. Strategically reeducate your friends and acquaintances, addressing negative perceptions if necessary. Get involved with projects that will showcase your new interests and abilities.

Prove your worth. Use the internet to create and share your content. Associate with the leading organizations in your field. Be consistent and committed as you move forward.

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As the current financial crisis and the Great Recession begin to ease, executives may be tempted to heave a sigh of relief and return to the comfort of business as usual. But doing so would constitute a serious mistake for their companies—and a grave disservice to capitalism itself, argues Barton, the global managing director of McKinsey & Company.

Rising income inequality, high unemployment, and spiraling budget deficits are fueling public distrust of business, while the shifting balance of power between East and West exacerbates these tensions. But perhaps the biggest danger is that short-term approaches to investing in and managing companies—the “quarterly capitalism” that led to the financial meltdown—still persist. The time is ripe, Barton says, to restore capitalism’s founding principles so that it can deliver the sustainable growth the world needs.

Business leaders have a choice: They can initiate the necessary reforms, or they can let the system be reformed for them. They should consider three concrete steps in particular: changing their organization’s structure and incentives to focus on the long term; disseminating the perspective that serving the interests of all major stakeholders is compatible with the goal of maximizing corporate value; and putting together more-effective boards, ones with the knowledge and heft to govern like owners.

None of these steps will be easy, Barton acknowledges, but they are all necessary to make capitalism stronger, more resilient, more innovative, and more equitable—a system once again worthy of the public’s trust.

Donahoe took over from Meg Whitman, eBay’s celebrated longtime CEO, just under three years ago. The core business was slipping, and eBay’s acquisition of Skype had gone wrong. The challenge facing him was how to keep the company strong despite enormous changes in consumer behavior. He talks about capitalizing on mobile technology—eBay’s iPhone application, “by far the largest m-commerce application in the world,” went from $600 million in volume in 2009 to between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in 2010—and breaking down the barriers between operating online and off-line. The company’s acquisitions of RedLaser and Milo, for example, mean that you can walk into a store, scan an item you want with your smartphone, and learn its price both across the web and at merchants within five or 10 miles of you. Because product search on the internet has undercut the power of eBay’s auctions, Donahoe is working to make its marketplace indifferent to format. He expects that fixed-price sales will eventually account for 70% of transactions. But that will require re-architecting almost every element of the business system.

Spotlight

For up-and-coming executives, an overseas posting has long been a rite of passage, providing opportunities not available in their native countries and experience that can be invaluable to their companies both during the assignment and after their return home. How has the Great Recession affected this formula? HBR spoke with the top human resources executives at four multinationals about how their companies are adapting global assignments to meet the demands of a changing world.

Siegfried Russwurm, of Siemens, talks about the need to recruit workers who will really engage with their new culture—workers with the capacity for truly “international thinking.” CEMEX’s Luis Hernández discusses personal and professional factors that can make or break an overseas assignment. In the same vein, Keumyong Chung describes measures that Samsung has taken to reduce failures, including preassignment training of various kinds.

Today’s economy is prompting cutbacks in some global programs, but the news is not all bad: For example, at Walmart, as Susan Chambers relates, a new emphasis on creative, shorter-term assignments is allowing more people (including more women) to obtain global experience without the major uprooting of a conventional expat assignment. It is also helping them get that experience earlier in their careers—when it can be of maximum benefit to the employee and the company alike.

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The power of analytics in decision making is well understood, but few companies have what it takes to successfully implement a complex analytics program. Most firms will get greater value from learning to do something simpler: basic business experiments.

Managers need to become adept at routinely using techniques employed by scientists and medical researchers. Specifically, they need to embrace the “test and learn” approach: Take one action with one group of customers, a different action (or no action at all) with a control group of customers, and then compare the results. The feedback from even a handful of experiments can yield immediate and dramatic improvements.

In this article, the authors provide a step-by-step guide to conducting business experiments. They look at organizational obstacles to success and outline seven rules to follow.

If your company is intrigued by the opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid but is hesitant to plunge in, it’s not alone: Despite the immensity of the markets and the volume of the hype, few multinational firms have built sizable businesses serving consumers or producers who survive on just a few dollars a day. The reason, say Karamchandani, Kubzansky, and Lalwani, is that it’s far more difficult than many global corporations realized to get prices low enough to attract consumers and to manage distributed low-income producers. The authors, from Monitor Group, report on the results of a study of 700 market-based initiatives for social change in India and Africa.

The obstacles to doing business at the bottom of the pyramid are significant: uncertain customer cash flow, difficulty gauging demand, distribution challenges, disaggregated providers, and undeveloped business ecosystems. Using examples from many diverse sectors—including microfinance, housing, insurance, and water purification—the authors explore innovative ways to surmount those obstacles and serve the world’s poor.

Experience

In 1984 the express delivery company Aramex had launched several small offices in the Middle East, hoping to become the first courier company based in that region. Money was tight, and cofounder and CEO Ghandour describes Aramex in those days as a scrappy, hand-to-mouth business. Global courier companies shied away from the Middle East, in part because there was little market demand for their services, and in part because civil wars and complex political relationships presented enormous logistical and bureaucratic challenges. Often the local postal authorities had a virtual monopoly on deliveries.

In this context Aramex approached the Seattle-based Airborne Express, a respected logistics company, offering to sell a 50% stake for $100,000. Airborne turned down the offer but promised to send some regional business Aramex’s way. That gave Aramex the credibility to approach other leading couriers; by 1987 FedEx was also a client.

Over the next two decades, the start-up took full advantage of Airborne’s experience, technology, and global reach to learn and grow. It became part of Airborne’s global alliance of regional courier companies, and access to Airborne’s package-tracking technology gave Aramex an enormous competitive advantage at a very low cost. In 1996 Airborne acquired 9% of Aramex for $2 million, and the following year Aramex became the first Arab company to trade on the NASDAQ.

Zoom buttons on digital devices let us examine images from many viewpoints. They also provide an apt metaphor for modes of strategic thinking. Some people prefer to see things up close, others from afar. Both perspectives have virtues. But they should not be fixed positions, says Harvard Business School’s Kanter. To get a complete picture, leaders need to zoom in and zoom out.

A close-in perspective is often found in relationship-intensive settings. It brings details into sharp focus and makes opportunities look large and compelling. But it can have significant downsides. Leaders who prefer to zoom in tend to create policies and systems that depend too much on politics and favors. They can focus too closely on personal status and on turf protection. And they often miss the big picture. When leaders zoom out, they can see events in context and as examples of general trends. They are able to make decisions based on principles. Yet a far-out perspective also has traps. Leaders can be so high above the fray that they don’t recognize emerging threats. Having zoomed out to examine all possible routes, they may fail to notice when the moment is right for action on one path. They may also seem too remote and aloof to their staffs.

The best leaders can zoom in to examine problems and then zoom out to look for patterns and causes. They don’t divide the world into extremes—idiosyncratic or structural, situational or strategic, emotional or contextual. The point is not to choose one over the other but to learn to move across a continuum of perspectives.